Semantic binding of classical and digital library system

Abstract

The automation of bibliographic catalog and house-keeping operations in a library and/or the introduction of digital library system have seldom delivered context-specific or personalized information for the end user. The existing cataloging and classification rules do not provide intelligent mechanism to store and retrieve ever-expanding information resources. Adopting semantic technology with ontology as the formalism to represent all resources can provide a better system for information storage and retrieval. This paper presents a resource ontology developed using any cataloging rule to provide semantic description of the resources (both printed and digital) of a library and the technical solution architecture to provide semantic library services triggered by an ontology management infrastructure and software agents. Separate ontologies to manage user community, classification scheme and subject categorization of resources enhance the semantics of user management and information retrieval.